On April 5-6, 2019, the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture will co-host “Eclecticism at the Edges: Medieval Art and Architecture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Cultural Spheres,” along with the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, the International Center of Medieval Art, and The Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University. This two-day symposium focuses on the art, history, and culture of Eastern Europe between the 14th and the 16th centuries.

In response to the global turn in art history and medieval studies, “Eclecticism at the Edges” explores the temporal and geographic parameters of the study of medieval art, seeking to challenge the ways in which we think about the artistic production of Eastern Europe from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. This event will serve as a long-awaited platform to examine, discuss, and focus on the eclectic visual cultures of the Balkan Peninsula and the Carpathian Mountains, the specificities, but also the shared cultural heritage of these regions. It will raise issues of cultural contact, transmission, and appropriation of western medieval and Byzantine artistic and cultural traditions in eastern European centers, and consider how this heritage was deployed to shape notions of identity and visual rhetoric in these regions that formed a cultural landscape beyond medieval, Byzantine, and modern borders.

Keynote Lectures

Dr. Jelena Erdeljan (University of Belgrade): Cross-Cultural Entanglement and Visual Culture in Eastern Europe c. 1300–1550

Dr. Michalis Olympios (University of Cyprus): “Eclecticism,” “Hybridity,” and “Transculturality” in Late Medieval Art: A View from the Eastern Mediterranean

Symposium Speakers

Dr. Vlad Bedros (National University of Arts, Bucharest): A Hybrid Iconography: The Lamb of God in Moldavian Wall Paintings

Dr. Elena Boeck (DePaul University): A Timeless Ideal: Constantinople in the Slavonic Imagination of the 14th–16th Centuries

Dr. Gianvito Campobasso (University of Fribourg): Eclecticism Among Multiple Identities: The Visual Culture of Albania in the Late Middle Ages

Krisztina Ilko (Ph.D. Candidate, Metropolitan Museum of Art Fellow): The Dormition of the Virgin: Artistic Exchange and Innovation in Medieval Wall Paintings from Slovakia

Dr. Nazar Kozak (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine): Post-Byzantine Art as a Network: Mobility Trajectories of the Akathistos Cycle in the Balkans, the Carpathians, and Beyond

Dr. Dragoş Gh. Năstăsoiu (Centre for Medieval Studies, National Research University, Moscow): Appropriation, Adaptation, and Transformation – Painters of Byzantine Tradition Working for Catholic Patrons in 14th- and 15th-century Transylvania

Dr. Ovidiu Olar (Nicolae Iorga Institute of History of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest): A Murderer Among the Seraphim: Prince Lăpuşneanu’s Transfiguration Embroideries for Slatina Monastery

Dr. Ida Sinkević (Lafayette College): Serbian Royal Mausolea: A Reflection of Cultural Identity?

Dr. Christos Stavrakos (University of Ioannina / Greece): Donors, Patrons and Benefactors in Mediaeval Epirus between the Great Empires: A Society in Change or a Continuity?

The symposium is free, but registration is required to guarantee seating. Please register here. For any queries, please contact the organizers at eclecticism.symposium@gmail.com.

Please join us for SHERA’s annual business meeting, followed by an informal hors d’oeuvres reception at this year’s ASEEES meeting in Boston. We will be discussing future projects, calling for nominations for board positions, and announcing the recipient of this year’s Emerging Scholar Prize! All members and non-members are welcome to attend.

Date: Friday, December 7, 8:00 to 9:30pm Location: Boston Marriott Copley Place, 3rd floor, Brandeis Room Business meeting at 8pm, reception to follow at 8:30-9:30 pm

We ask that those who can, please contribute $25 toward the cost of food and drinks, either at the reception or via our online donation page: http://shera-art.org/donate

Please RSVP here.

The Kumu Art Museum’s fall conference 2018

01.–03.11.2018 in the auditorium of the Kumu Art Museum

The sixth Kumu Art Museum’s fall conference focuses on art and society in post-socialist Eastern Europe in the 1990s.

Fundamental political, social and cultural changes that took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet Union have been analysed in numerous publications and at many seminars and conferences. The Kumu Art Museum’s fall conference aims for a re-evaluation of these changes in relation to the notion of “space” and concepts of “spatiality”, and examines social and cultural processes in Eastern Europe in the 1990s through spatial interactions.

The “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences in the late 1980s emerged at the crossroads of critical theory, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and other intellectual movements that shaped the last decades of the 20th century, and was inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and others. The turn brought about a new kind of attentiveness to the agency of physical, but also conceptual or imaginary, space/s in social relations and cultural production. Space was not looked at as a neutral area or container where things take place and time flows through, but as something that organises and expresses power relations, gives meanings to events and is always part of what happens.

Post-socialist spaces of the 1990s can be understood as physical, geographical, sociological, political, psychological, cultural, virtual or metaphorical spaces that are not necessarily fixed, but may be fluid and changeable. Eastern Europe can be looked at as one space or as a conglomerate of multiple spaces; the culture of the 1990s may be analysed through creation and destruction, foundation and disappearance, displacements and collisions of spaces.

The conference focuses on Eastern European art histories, but also welcomes presentations from other disciplines that help to explain art historical processes. We are looking forward to both theoretical contributions and case studies of artistic phenomena from the 1990s.

The conference will focus on five topics:

I Lost and found spaces

Old and new networks in the art world, new practices and technologies, thinking spaces and utopias, travelling and migration

II Creating spaces

The figure of the curator in the art scene, discursive models of curating, creating communities, new art events and institutions

III Mapping spaces

Role models in the global art world, conflicts between internal and external identities, power positions, included and excluded spaces

IV Taking over spaces

New strategies of self-assertion, alternatives for national and neoliberal narratives, critical exhibitions and institutions

V Living spaces

Everyday life, history and ways of remembering, subjective positions, gender relations and psychological changes in the art world

The opening lecture will be held by Viktor Misiano. Invited speakers include Boris Buden (Berlin), Renata Salecl (University of Ljubljana), Madina Tlostanova (Linköping University) and Larry Wolff (New York University).

Conference board: Anu Allas (Kumu Art Museum), Sirje Helme (Art Museum of Estonia), Anders Härm (Institute of Art History and Visual Culture at the Estonian Academy of Arts) and Viktor Misiano (Moscow Art Magazine).

Along with the conference, an exhibition of Estonian art of the 1990s (curated by Eha Komissarov and Anders Härm) will open in the Kumu Art Museum, and the third Kumu Art Film Festival KuFF, which focuses on the film and video productions of the 1990s, will take place. Selected conference papers will be published in The Proceedings of the Art Museum of Estonia.

Conference Programme

reative Time is pleased to announce programming for its 11th Creative Time Summit, an annual convening for thinkers, dreamers, and doers working at the intersection of art and politics. The Summit will be held in Miami for the first time this November 1-3, 2018.

Titled On Archipelagos and Other Imaginaries—Collective Strategies to Inhabit the World, it takes coalition as a central theme, and utilizes the archipelago as a framework to delve into Miami’s historical connection to the Caribbean and, by extension, to Latin America and the entire world. The topics under discussion will range from immigration and borders to climate realities notions of intersectional justice, gentrification, tourism as an enabler for neocolonialism, and the roles art and activism can play in all these pressing issues.

“50 years after the upheavals of 1968, we continue to grapple with a host of pressing issues, from the ongoing legacies of colonialism to climate change and xenophobia,” said Creative Time Executive Director Justine Ludwig. “There’s no better place for this conversation than Miami, a home to so many incredible artists, activists, and thinkers. We couldn’t be prouder to host the summit here, or of the participants and the invaluable insights they’ll be bringing to bear on some of the most critical issues of our time.”

This year’s summit is co-presented with the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, with leading support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of its Knight Arts Challenge. Passes are available on a sliding scale from $25 – $300 — register here. For the full program, click here.

“Artists continue to be the leading voices in times of change,” stated Michael Spring, Senior Advisor to the Mayor and Director of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs. “Historically, our community has been a fulcrum of cultural and social change, and the Creative Time Summit offers a unique opportunity for artists to come together to explore the intersection of arts and politics in a city that continues to be at the center of it all. We are proud to co-present the summit and bring it to Miami for the first time.”

CREATIVE TIME SUMMIT: On Archipelagoes And Other Imaginaries—Collective Strategies To Inhabit The World
Thursday, November 1 – Saturday, November 3

Thursday, November 1
Opening Party at the Perez Art Museum Miami

Friday, November 2
Full day of main stage presentations at the Knight Concert Hall at the Adrienne Arsht Center

Saturday, November 3
Breakout sessions at various locations across Miami, and outdoor film series at SoundScape Park

This year’s Summit commemorates a milestone in the history of international coalitions and solidarity: the resilience of the global uprisings of 1968. Half a century later, the Summit will gather dozens of cultural critics, artists, and activists to discuss strategies for political cooperation in the face of social unrest and environmental collective struggles.

Miami is a symbol of connectedness — whether, as a polyglot city and hub for migration, in terms of our connections to one another, or, as a city already grappling with the effects of climate change, our dependence on the natural world. Embracing this context, On Archipelagoes and Other Imaginaries will shed light onto international migrations and depopulation, queer cultures, indigenous ways of being, tourism industries, and ecological disasters by engaging with de-colonial dialogues and new social imaginaries.

The Summit will be broken up into four thematic sections: “Facing climate realities, reimagining a green future,” “Toward an intersectional justice,” “Resisting displacement and violence,” and “On boundaries and a borderless future.”

These themes will be explored through community-driven breakout sessions, social events, roundtable discussions, workshops, panels, field trips, interactive performances, screenings, and other creative formats designed to share tools, strategies, and actions with over 1,000 international and local attendees. Breakout sessions will be happen across the city, working in collaboration with the community leaders and groups that preserve and honor these living histories, by de-centering knowledge bases, platforms for learning and the typical architects of change. The Summit will engage with the tools for resistance, solidarity, and coalition, while offering moments for celebration through programming at Summit social events.

The Summit will hold its inaugural Film Series in Miami-Beach, featuring showings by filmmakers from the Miami-Florida area, the Caribbean, Latin America, and beyond, highlighting the richness and diversity of independent filmmaking. The selected films broadly engage with the major themes of this year’s Summit, encouraging thoughtful conversations around borders and migration, ecological struggles, gender politics, and economic inequality.

Bhenji Ra, genderqueer performance and interdisciplinary artist; Vijay Prashad, Indian historian, journalist, and Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research; Brigada Puerta de Tierra, the grassroots artist collective from Puerto Rico; Timothy Morton, Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, and member of the object-oriented philosophy movement; Edwidge Danticat, Award-winning author of several books and 2009 MacArthur fellow; and Krudas Cubensi, Cuban activist, queer, and feminist hip hop group are amongst this year’s participants. Full list below.

The 2018 Creative Time Summit is curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose in collaboration with Corina L. Apostol.

PARTICIPANTS (LIST IN FORMATION) Participants include Zach Blas, Brigada Puerta de Tierra, Colectivo Universitario de Disidencia Sexual (CUDS), Houston Cypress, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Edwidge Danticat (Keynote), Pablo Desoto, Marilyn Douala Bell, Elvis Fuentes, Krudas Cubensi, Anna Minton, Timothy Morton (Keynote), Yanelys Nuñez Leyva, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Dan Perjovschi, Lia Perjovschi, Vijay Prashad (Keynote), Bhenji Ra, Colibrí Sanfiorenzo Barnhard, William Cordova, Maja and Reuben Fowkes, and more to be announced.

CREATIVE TIME SUMMIT 2018 ADVISORY COUNCIL
Elvis Fuentes, Independent Curator based in New York and Miami
Jane Gilbert, Chief Resilience Officer, City of Miami
Tom Healy, Writer and Curator based in Miami and New York
Meena Jagannath, Co-founder of the Community Justice Project and Movement Lawyer based in Miami
Gean Moreno, Curator of Programs, ICA Miami
Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Co-director of Beta-Local, Puerto Rico
Amanda Sanfilippo Long, Curator and Artist Manager of Art in Public Places, Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, Director and Chief Curator of Fringe Projects, Miami Dr. Amanda Cachia, Accessibility Advisor, Curator and Disability Activist, based in California

SUMMIT 2018 PROJECT SUPPORT
2018 Creative Time Summit: On Archipelagos and Other Imaginaries: Collective Strategies to Inhabit the World is co-presented with Art in Public Places of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs with leading support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Dear SHERA Members,

Panel proposals for a SHERA sponsored panel for the 2019 CAA Annual Conference in New York, February 13-16, are invited.

We encourage submission of proposals discussing issues of art or art history in any of the fields SHERA as a Society covers. The organizer of the panel must be a CAA member (membership number must be provided) as well as member of SHERA.

Please submit your panel proposal to shera.artarchitecture@gmail.com by April 15, 2018. While SHERA’s Board will select the panel to be submitted on our Society’s behalf to CAA, be reminded that the ultimate decision of acceptance is CAA’s.

Dear Colleagues,

The SHERA Board is pleased to announce the SHERA-sponsored panel to be held at the meeting of ASEEES in Boston from December 6-10 as well as two runners-up. While ASEEES does not have a mechanism for noting runners-up in the convention’s online or printed schedules, we would like to recognize particularly interesting panels as well as alerting the membership to their colleagues’ current and ongoing research. Thank you to everyone who took the time to submit a panel.

Final confirmation of acceptance of panels will not be announced until June 1. After that time, SHERA’s board members will pull together a list of all panels potentially of interest to the membership. Members are all invited to announce their panels, together with dates and times, on H-SHERA after acceptance notifications are sent out in early May.

The panel selected for 2018 is:

The Passion for Collecting: Collectors and Their Collections in Imperial Russia (1800-1917)

The panel is devoted to the history of private collections in the long nineteenth century in imperial Russia. It discusses collections, collectors and their collecting practices in order to explore collectors’ purposes and intellectual pursuits, the exhibiting and popularization of collected objects, art and artifacts, and debates triggered by collections’ display.

Chair: Kyeann Sayer, PhD Candidate (University of Hawai’i at Manoa)

Laura Schlosberg, PhD (Stanford University), “Zinaida Volkonskaia’s Allée de Souvenirs at the Villa Wolkonsky in Rome”

The paper examines Volkonskaia’s Allée de Souvenirs as a historical and autobiographical creation, a collection with both personal and educational purposes. While Diego Angeli identified the Allée as an expression of Volkonskaia’s nostalgia, the Allée presents a historical narrative, one in conversation with its Roman setting connecting Russia to European civilization.

Hanna Chuchvaha, PhD (Independent scholar), “Craftswomen and Stitches: Print Collections of Female Crafts in Late Imperial Russia (1860-1917)”

The paper analyzes the specific female collectors’ focus on objects associated with women, their pastimes, domesticity and femininity understood as an expression of both self and group identity. The paper explores the printed albums of female crafts collected and published by Sofia Davydova, Olena Pchilka, Princess S. N. Shakhovskaia, Natalia Shabel’skaia’s daughters, and Ebba Salwen.

Isabel Stokholm, PhD Candidate (University of Cambridge), “‘Having glimpsed the light, one does not wish for darkness’: Reform and Rehang in the Tretyakov Gallery, 1913-1917”

The paper explores four years of upheaval and change in the Tretyakov, bookended by the publication of its first scholarly catalogue in 1917. It examines how Russia’s artistic community engaged with the gallery when it was still finding its feet in the transition from private to national, following the death of Pavel Tretyakov fourteen years prior.

Discussant: Alla Myzelev, PhD (SUNY, Geneseo)

As noted above, we hope that all those attending the 2018 meeting will note the two submitted panels selected as runners-up:

Culture’s Industry, Industry’s Culture: Negotiation of Art, Craft and Industry through the Soviet Mid-Century
Christianna Bonin, Presenter and Chair, PhD Candidate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Olivia Crough, Presenter, PhD Candidate, Harvard University
Suheyla Takesh, Presenter, SMArchS Candidate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dr. Maria Mileeva, Discussant, Teaching Fellow, University College London

Perhaps more than any other topos, the industrial factory has shaped conceptions of Soviet art in historical and contemporary imaginations. Its salience is evident in the divergent ways that artists, critics, and political officials debated and performed the effects of industrial mass production on art-making across the Soviet mid-century: from the 1920s, when the production line became the key to training “engineerartists” and socializing art by removing it from allegedly backward handcraft and bourgeois studio practices; to the 1960s, when a growing number of historians and preservationists viewed industrialization as a threat to traditional cultures and craft skills. Questioning culture’s changing relationship to labor and industry, this panel examines the effects of the industrial factory as both a real and imagined site on artists and their work. Our case studies focus on artists from or practicing across Central Asia, Russia, and the Middle East because their work critically reveals the extent of Soviet cultural and industrial hegemony, as well as shifts in the utility of local practice to industry before and after World War II. In each of our case studies, we consider the circulation and commoditization of objects and practical knowledge into market goods, collectibles and tourism industries. Countering the belief that modern industry eliminates craft or tradition, this panel reveals how these concepts operate in tandem in the Soviet context.

The first paper considers Varvara Stepanova’s role in the state publishing industry, as a woman designer and art director, parsing how publications such as 10 years of Soviet Uzbekistan (1934) produces relations between Central Asian culture, craft, and the cotton industry in the 1930s. The second paper analyzes a hybrid form of painting made by a young generation of Kazakh artists in 1960s Almaty. Aware that the introduction of industrial labor and a system of fine art education had deskilled or eliminated certain forms of Kazakh carpet-making, this group combined older carpet-making techniques with the primitivist aesthetics of Western artists in their paintings in order to perform their modernity internationally, while also appealing to state-led craft revival programs. The third paper examines the work of Iraqi artist Mahmoud Sabri, who studied in Moscow in the 1960s under socialist realist painter Aleksandr Deineka” and utilized the aesthetic and craft technique of Orthodox icon painting in works attending to the trauma of Communists’ repression in Iraq.

Exhibiting Artistic Change: Social and Aesthetic Dimensions of Art Exhibitions in Imperial Russia

This panel aims to explore the changing role, function, and format of art exhibitions in Imperial Russia. Advocating an interdisciplinary approach, the panel will address both the aesthetic and the social aspects of art exhibitions. The aesthetic aspect will include examination of the manner in which the state, academies, voluntary societies, art groups and individual artists represent their aesthetic agenda through the exhibition medium; the extent to which the exhibition can be instrumental in constructing and promoting national identity; and the ways in which art exhibitions affected the development of the art historical narratives. The social aspect will explore both the political and commercial dimensions of the exhibition practice: to which extent did art exhibitions contribute to the expansion of the public art scene in Russia? What was the role of the art market, state (censorship), voluntary societies, artists, critics and viewers in this process? How did the art exhibition as a marketing tool change over time and what were the social and artistic implications?

Chair: Aglaya Glebova, UC Irvine

Margaret Samu, The New School, Parsons School of Design, Art Exhibitions at Auctions and Estate Sales in St. Petersburg 1750–1850
Where could St. Petersburgers see and learn about works of art in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Most scholarly literature about this period dwells on the absence of art on public view in the capital, relieved only by the triennial exhibitions at the Imperial Academy of Arts. Recent research, however, shows that exhibitions held before auctions and estate sales served as important venues for members of the literate classes to develop their knowledge of art and hone their connoisseurial skills. Because these exhibitions did not charge admission, nor require viewers to make purchases, they allowed non-elite classes the same opportunity to view art as the nobility who bought works for their collections. Drawing on newspaper announcements, sale inventories, and other primary sources, this paper will examine the role of these exhibitions in the development of taste and visual literacy in St. Petersburg before the mid-nineteenth century.

Nikita Balagurov, Higher School of Economics Saint Petersburg, Inventing the Russian School of Art at the 1882 All-Russian Exhibition
Abstract. In Moscow in 1882, the state-sponsored All-Russian Exhibition for the first time showcased achievements in the arts, along with those in heavy and light industries. Celebrating Tsar Alexander II’s reign, this Art Section, entitled “Twenty-Five Years of Russian Art”, became the first comprehensive survey of contemporary Russian art. By reconstructing the ideological, social and aesthetic aspects of the section, this paper scrutinizes this earliest attempt to formulate a narrative of a Russian “national school of art,” which was then further developed by the critic Vladimir Stasov in his influential essay by the same title (1882–1883) and in the founding of the Russian Museum of Alexander III in Saint Petersburg in 1898.

Andrey Shabanov, European University at St Petersburg, The End of the “Salons” in Russia and Western Europe
Abstract. The most defining professional emancipation of Russian artists in the late nineteenth century occurred with the privatization of art exhibitions — from an exhibition ruled by the Academy or other state-sponsored institutions, to one that was independently run. This change was realized by the Peredvizhniki (known in English as the Wanderers or Itinerants), which consisted of Moscow and St Petersburg artists who organized touring art exhibitions. The present paper will explore this major shift in exhibiting practices in Russia and its broader aesthetic and social implications. It will also examine how these changes related to similar late nineteenth-century institutional developments in Western Europe.

Discussants:
Maria Mileeva, University College London, Research and Teaching Fellow
Jane Sharp, Rutgers University

SHERA invites our members to submit session proposals for a SHERA-sponsored session at the Society of Architectural Historians SAH 72nd Annual International Conference in Providence RI, April 24-28, 2019. Session proposals should be submitted to the SHERA Board at: [shera.artarchitecture@gmail.com] (shera.artarchitecture@gmail.com) by SHERA deadline - December 10, 2017, and should comply with the instructions found below in the SAH Call for Sessions. The chair (co-chairs) of the selected proposal will be notified ASAP, for timely submission on the SAH website.

The individual proposing a SHERA-sponsored session must follow the same selection process for SAH conference sessions proposed by organizations as those proposed by individuals. Acceptance is not guaranteed. A Conference session selected by SAH Conference Committee is considered an academic achievement.

Session proposals must include the following elements:

1. A session title not longer than 65 characters, including spaces and punctuation
2. Summary of the subject and the premise in no more than 500 words
3. Name, professional affiliation (if applicable), address, telephone, and email address (if your session is sponsored by SHERA, you also have to become a SAH member, and ensure that the information you are providing matches an existing SAH profile/membership account to avoid misdirecting communications.
4. A current CV (2 pages maximum)

Although the SAH membership is international, the annual conference is conducted in English. Therefore, all session proposals must be submitted in English and, if accepted, conducted in English.

SAH Call for Sessions SAH 2019 Annual International Conference

www.sah.org/conferences-and-programs/2019-conference—-providence

SAH Submission Deadline: January 16, 2018, at 5 pm CST.

The Society of Architectural Historians will offer a total of 36 paper sessions at its 2019 Annual International Conference in Providence, Rhode Island. The Society invites its members, including graduate students and independent scholars, representatives of SAH chapters and partner organizations, to chair a session at the conference. As SAH membership is required to chair or present research at the annual conference, non-members who wish to chair a session will be required to join SAH next August 2018 when conference registration opens for Session Chairs and Speakers.  
Since the principal purpose of the SAH annual conference is to inform attendees of the general state of research in architectural history and related disciplines, session proposals covering every time period and all aspects of the built environment, including landscape and urban history, are encouraged.

Sessions may be theoretical, methodological, thematic, interdisciplinary, pedagogical, revisionist or documentary in premise and ambition and have broadly conceived or more narrowly focused subjects. Sessions that embrace cross-cultural, transnational and/or non-Western topics are particularly welcome. In every case, the subject should be clearly defined in critical and historical terms.

Since late submissions cannot be considered, it is recommended that proposals be submitted well before the deadline. Last-minute submissions that fail posting in the online portal or are sent in error via email cannot be considered. Only proposals submitted through the online portal can be considered.     To ensure broad participation in the SAH Annual International Conference, individuals are limited to the role of either a session chair OR a speaker. If you are selected as a session chair you may not submit a paper abstract to other sessions to be considered for speaking.
Each Session Chair and Speaker is expected to fund his or her own travel and related expenses to participate in the conference. A copy of the Session Chair and Speaker Agreement that includes deadlines and step-by-step processes will be distributed to both Session Chairs and Speakers. Session Chairs and Speakers are required to join SAH and pre-register for the conference starting in August 2018.

SAH Key Dates October 03, 2017, 3 pm CDT - Call for sessions opens January 16, 2018, 5 pm CST - Deadline to submit a session proposal February 23, 2018 - Session selection notification March 9, 2018, 5 pm CDT - Revised session proposals due April 3, 2018, 3 pm CDT - Call for papers opens June 5, 2018, 5 pm CDT - Deadline to submit a paper abstract June 7, 2018 - Session Chairs start reviewing paper submissions July 13, 2018 - Session Chairs make final selection of papers and notify speakers August 1, 2018 - Session Chair & Speaker registration opens September 27, 2018 - Session Chair & Speaker registration closes

Recent developments in biotechnology, genetics, and artificial intelligence suggest that the ancient myths of eternal youth, immortality, and material resurrection are now a tangible horizon of the technological imagination. At the same time, a century of dreams for travel in cosmic space and life on other planets have coalesced into a new transcendental realm—infinite in size, yet located in the material world, which itself has radically expanded. What are the politics and aesthetics of life in this new world? Already in the late 19th century, Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov started considering some of these questions in his philosophy of the common task, which advocated technological immortality, material resurrection for all who had ever lived, and the exploration of outer space. A central tenet of Fedorov’s larger philosophical outlook, known as Russian Cosmism, puts art on par with science, technology, and social organization as an integral force ushering in the new world. Fedorov’s ideas inspired numerous artists, writers, and scientists in his lifetime and well after his physical death. Following the October Revolution in 1917, Russian Cosmism became attractive to the materialist philosophy at the core of Communist ideology. This radical vision of everlasting life in the cosmos was particularly important for the Russian avant-garde, which explored the possibilities of new worlds through Suprematism, Constructivism, and other related movements that have been long represented in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. post presents “Russian Cosmism: A Work of Art in the Age of Technological Immortality” will address the ideas of Russian Cosmism and their relevance to our time. During this one-night symposium, Boris Groys will speak on the biopolitics of technological immortality and resurrection; Arseny Zhilyaev considers the aesthetic ideals of Russian Cosmism including “life building” in collaboration with God; Hito Steyerl will talk about continued quests for the elixir of immortality, euthanasia, and genocide; and Anton Vidokle will present a recent short film called The Communist Revolution Was Caused by the Sun. Boris Groys is a philosopher, essayist, and media theorist. Having taught in Philadelphia, Münster, and Los Angeles, he became Professor of Art History, Philosophy and Media Theory at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in 1994. In 2009, he was appointed Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. He has published widely on the subject of the Russian avant-garde and was curator of the exhibition Dream Factory Communism at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 2003–04. Hito Steyerl is a writer and filmmaker. Her works have been exhibited at the 32nd São Paulo Biennial (2016), the 9th Berlin Biennale (2016), the German Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and Documenta 12 (2007), among other venues and institutions. Anton Vidokle is an artist and editor of e-flux journal. He was born in Moscow and lives in New York and Berlin. Vidokle’s work has been exhibited internationally at Documenta 13 and at the 56th Venice Biennale. His films have been presented at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Garage Museum, Moscow; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; and others. Arseny Zhilyaev is an artist based in Moscow. In recent works he has examined the legacy of Soviet museology and the museum within Russian Cosmism. Among other writings, he has published articles in e-flux journal. Zhilyaev is editor of Avant-Garde Museology (2015). His works have been shown at the Gwangju Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, and the Ljubljana Triennial, as well as in exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; De Appel, Amsterdam; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris and San Francisco; and the V-A-C Foundation, Moscow.

Translations and Dialogues: The Reception of Russian Art Abroad

The reception of Russian art in Europe and the United States is the subject of a three-day international conference, hosted by the Centro Studi sulle Arti della Russia (CSAR) at the University Ca’ Foscari in Venice, and co-organized by the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture, Inc. (SHERA) and the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (CCRAC).

This conference brings together scholars from Europe, the US, and Russia on the centenary of the October Revolution to present their work on a broader historical spectrum than the events of only 1917. By focusing on the reception of Russian art abroad, it hopes to engage with ideas of continuity and connection more than rupture and separation. In doing so, it promises to bring out new perspectives on the study of the history of Russian art as a vibrant and growing field. The conference organizers are part of an international network of scholarly societies and research institutes that came together with the revival of SHERA in 2013. This is their first collaborative conference.

All events will take place in the Auditorium Santa Margherita at the University Ca’ Foscari. Please register if you are planning to attend here: http://veniceconference.com/registration

Brief Schedule

25 October 2017

Opening Reception and Grand Opening

Session 1: Dialogues with Western Europe

Session 2: Vereshchagin and Makovsky Abroad

Session 3: Towards the Fin de Siècle

26 October 2017

Session 1: Russian and Soviet Art in Germany in the 1920s

Session 2: Russian and Soviet Art in America and Europe

Session 3: Malevich, Tatlin, Lissitzky

27 October 2017

Session 1: Soviet Nonconformist Art and Its Reception Abroad

Session 2: Exhibiting Russian Art Abroad: Curatorial Ventures

Roundtable I: Collecting Russian Art (in memory of Norton Dodge)

Roundtable II: International Exhibition Practices

International Conference: Art Born in the Revolution: Russian Art and the State 1917-1932
With guest speakers including John Bowlt, Maria Gough, Christina Kiaer, Christina Lodder and Robert Service

Art Born in the Revolution: Russian Art and the State 1917-1932

Day one: Courtauld Institute of Art – Friday 24 February, 14:00-18:45. Book tickets
Day two: Royal Academy of Arts – Saturday 25 February, 10:30-18:30. Book tickets

The Royal Academy of Arts, in association with the Courtauld Institute of Art, presents a two-day academic conference to coincide with the exhibition Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 for scholars, students and those interested in the period.

Turned overnight into the ruling party, the Bolsheviks aimed to use the power of mass propaganda in order to establish their founding mythology and disseminate their ideas to an overwhelmingly rural and illiterate population. In 1917 the leader of the new Bolshevik state, Vladimir Lenin, proclaimed that culture should support political needs.

The first day of the conference is held at the Courtauld Institute of Art and aims to address the question of how useful visual art was to the revolution, as well as the ways in which cinema, printed media and consumer goods were used for propaganda purposes. The second day considers the death and immortalisation of key revolutionary figures, such as Lenin, and the consequent establishment of autocratic rule under Stalin, alongside the impact that social, political and economic developments had on the visual arts and culture.

Organised by Dr Natalia Murray, the Courtauld Institute of Art. Full conference programme below. Please note that each day requires a separate booking.

Day one: Friday 24 February 2017 - The Courtauld Institute of Art
2pm – 6.45pm (registration from 1.30pm)
Tickets £16 (£11 concession)
Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, WC2R 0RN

Day two: Saturday 25 February 2017 - The Royal Academy of Arts
10.30am – 6.30pm (registration from 10am)
Tickets £50 (including entry into the exhibition, refreshments and drinks)
Reynolds Room, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, Mayfair, W1J 0BD